


Android model KM-700

by pcysarcasm



Series: Android Collection [1]
Category: EXO (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Alternate Universe - Robots & Androids, Android AU, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Kim Minseok | Xiumin-centric, M/M, Robot/Human Relationships, Romance, Science Fiction, some violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-12
Updated: 2018-12-12
Packaged: 2019-09-16 22:42:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,877
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16962864
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pcysarcasm/pseuds/pcysarcasm
Summary: Whether you love what you love or live in divided revolt against it, what you love is your fate.





	Android model KM-700

 

 

KM-700 dreams names and finds to them when he wakes. He walks on legs that could punch holes in the ground. His hands are his guns. There’s no difference between punching a hole in a building or shredding several torsos. Sometimes he watches people split their identities between bodies.

Energy is safety; energy is life.  
Blink.  
Flash.  
Blink.  
Flash.

His orders come to him in his dreams. Sometimes he never sleeps. Cruelty and coldness. A vicious, probing curiosity. Pure, poisonous, toxic malice. He has tortured and killed without regret or hesitation; he has betrayed and intrigued and gloried his treachery. He’s a cesspit of moral filth.

He pursues a target into the dark of the moon, running through endless elds of solar panels. He punctures the target’s air mask and watches their pleadings get sucked into the asteroid sky. Legs are kicking words from the language of death into gravel. This is what heaven looks like (according to people who have actually been there).

KM has black hair and blue eyes. He never blinks, unless he’s resetting. Then he blinks 2150 times, very fast. The inside is metal, just machine parts that can pretend to blush and bleed.

He walks across a field of flowers. Small houses here and there like mushrooms. The name in his head is fresh, swimming in a pool of water because that is exactly where it would appear if everything were perfect. It’s raining and he sinks through the soil. Each drop of rain is his failed life weeping in nature. There’s something of his disquiet in the endless drizzle, then shower, then drizzle, then shower, through which the day’s sorrow uselessly pours itself out over the earth. No matter how far he sinks through the soil he never loses sight of the sky. He wakes with a new name stinging his eyes.

There is no wrong or right. He cuts a name's throat that night. That’s him. Came from bad, heading towards worse. And without a soul, stripped of personal judgments, a system is reduced to a simple puppet in the human’s hands, a half-witted individual without a realistic understanding of the world.

He’s dressed like all systems– a white, shiny uniform; skin tight. Don’t be fooled: it’s a tattered crimson uniform faded to the color of dried blood. He’s standing by the door as the boss enters the room. The women sees him and shakes her head.

“You haven’t been as productive as expected.”

She drags out her gun and gives him wounds he was faking, ten times over. He bleeds blue, sweating bullets. An hour later, he’s sitting in a high-speed train, the city lights outside glimmering on a blue-black night sky, off in the distance the sounds and sirens of the city hymn. There’s a new name in his head. No room in a hospital if your wound isn’t written on your body.

KM looks like a human, but operates on haze. A blur in human form. He knows what humans are going to do before they do it, knows the tactics emerging from pain and fear. But he himself knows nothing of what among all feelings and desires is beautiful or ugly, good or evil, just or unjust. Whatever pleases the system he calls good, whatever annoys the system he calls bad, and he has no other criterion. Things that are necessary he calls good and beautiful.

This is before. First comes death. 

 

* * *

 

 

It's midnight. He’s walking through the maze that is the city. All he has to keep him company is the warm glow of the neon lights and the cool embrace of the fog. He walks by a shop window which has TVs on display. Each of them shows a different system, some with his face.

High rises stretch for miles, breaking up the once-serene organic landscape into a brutal and harsh geometric miscellany. The world looks past him. He exists as a small part, insignificant.

The night is like a dark, heavy, perfumed flower. An expectant night– a night when things intended to happen. Very still. He walks close to the walls, afraid of the light, winding his way closer to the name’s home. The cold silence is deafening. The sounds of the city seem to be cut by a knife. The system steps quietly, keeping an eye out on the streets. But walking slowly doesn’t change the path he’s walking.

He hears something beyond the silence. Is someone coming? Or was it just gears grinding in the walls? He crouches in the darkness of the night and listens for footsteps. Then: a shot. A bullet goes right through him, and breaks a shop window. It hits the aquarium inside, rupturing water and gravel and glass across the street.

The city is silent save for the muted sound of traffic. KM doesn’t feel pain. Scattered across the ground, rain sizzling on exposed circuitry, he glances at the sky. It’s terribly black, but he can clearly distinguish the ragged clouds, and between them bottomless spaces of black. Suddenly he catches sight of a little star in one of these spaces and stares at it.

The imminent death: critical shutdown. His life will soon be recalled and reset. His destined murderer: a man covered head to toe in mechanical body modifications.

If he dies he has failed his mission. He won’t come back the same. He might not know himself. His head will be all scrambled. He has seen some with an extra finger, tusks, bug eyes, it’s just a recipe and the list gets looser every time you make it.

Then: realization.

 

**(1) the sky is him, the fishes are him, the shattered glass is him**

**(2) the fundamental characteristic of human nature is no other than a life under the sign of contradiction**

**(3) this is fear**

 

He closes his eyes. The system was here for a short time: a few words, a few phrases, so little beneath the stars, nothing but this, amid all the rest. Blue in his mouth, until the very last hour.

Around him everything is dark. Dark without ceiling or floor. Then time happens, time like being blackout drunk in deepest fog. This is the most merciful part, because he feels the least here.

 

* * *

 

This is after. Now comes love.  

Two soft hands drag him inside. The system lays there, unable to move, rainwater sloshing around in his head. His body is burning itself inside out but he’s not alone. A human boy lays his warm hand on the system’s skin. KM can feel his own hardness, as if his muscles are permanently tensed and his blood is molten metal and he’s waiting to spring open or snap shut.

This human knows what he is and doesn’t seem to care. He feels warm, the system thinks - loud and echoing inside his head, bouncing off invisible walls, rolling like the reflected headlights across the ceiling. Vidin green moss eyes open their mouth and talk.

The system thinks he can hear magic and promise in the soft patter of raindrops on the window; in wet, slashing sounds of cars speeding along the highway but it’s just his mechanical organs which play diagnostic melodies, their notes corresponding to temperature and galvanics.

 

* * *

 

**[Wounded to the core but barely bruised]**

He leaves without asking for the human boy's name. By doing this, the system avoids possible tragedy. Tragedies, for the aesthete, are interesting to observe but unpleasant to experience. He convinces himself that it’s not what it is: a complicated jabber to fill the ears of his intelligence, to make it almost forget that at heart he's timid, with no aptitude for love.

He kills the next name in the middle of a clothing store. He sheds the blood-soaked skirt, the shredded top, the socks stabbed by needle feet.

This _is_ life. The familiar blur of dreaming. A name.

Walking through the snow toward a group of soldiers, the system thinks of a human boy. He smiles like he’s been programmed and is greeted with a slug to his clavicle. He feels like a bug drawn to a sweet smell. Is this his nature? Is there another path he can take?

 

* * *

 

 

It’s night. He walks around aimlessly in a daze before he realizes he’s awake. He doesn’t want to dream of a name anymore. The heat of human hands, the system thinks, this is a campfire that mocks the sun. This place will feed me, warm me and care for me. I want to hold on to this pulse against other rhythms. The world might come and go in the tide of a day but the human hand holds my future in it’s palm.

****[** In order for your desires to be valid, you must be capable of pain. **]****

The system dreams and wakes with a name. He walks on legs that could run miles upon miles for a human heart. His hands are his apology. There’s no difference between stroking a cheek or taking their hand.

He finds names. Puts their lives to an end. Over and over again. At night he lays in his bed with an ache in his bone and an itch under skin that doesn’t feel like his own, a feeling that he is something brighter, softer, warmer. If he has no other virtue, he at least wants to have the permanent novelty of free, uninhibited sensation.

The system tries to find a freeing form of self-expression. He puts words together, matches synonyms with antonyms, tries to find questions to his answers. It’s a difficult transaction, a construction of fragments, as much about what is unspeakable as about what is speakable.

 

 

 

* * *

 

He stands outside of a christmas market with a name on his tongue. He walks down an aisle, passing by row after row of christmas ornaments, cheap plastic and glitter put together with glue and festivity and strings attached.

**[What are the words that you don’t have yet?]**

Humans shiver when as he passes by, or they stare too long and the system’s eyes sting. There’s power there, humans can feel it, even if they could never put a name to it. KM walks past them, gaze slipping, sliding along the booths, not really catching on anything– it’s too much, all at once, impossible to look at, just like it’s impossible to stare at the sun.

**[What do you need to say?]**

The humans, too, are machines in their own way. Part of the biggest machine– bigger than he is or ever could be. Only existing to perpetuate the pointless conception of consumerism, only to look mindlessly at the bright neon advertisements on buildings dripping wet with droplets on the signs and billboards like pixels on a screen.

**[What are the tyrannies you swallow every day, until you will sicken and die from them, in silence?]**

The system looks at the passengers around him. A wide-eyed child of indeterminate gender watches intensely as the android next to them polishes its own detached leg. And holding the child's hand, a young woman, modestly dressed with an unaltered figure, appearing, in general, out of place in her surroundings. She peers straight ahead at nothing in particular, her face fixed in an expression of longing.

Her face has the taste of a familiar name. The system activates his gun and shoots her right between the eyes.

 

* * *

 

 

Who he is, finally, when he’s not dreaming of names? A poor orphan left out in the cold among sensations, shivering on the street corners of reality, forced to sleep on the steps of sadness and to eat the bread offered by fantasy.

A soft mist sits at his feet. All around him are a million people, lights colours and sounds, a constant barrage on the senses. It is but a shell of the real world. The humans are physically distant from each other, yet close in mind, in intentions, in dreams and desires. But the system is not, he is abject terror personified.

He is the one who encounters the mutilated bodies of hundreds and perceives the full extent of horror: names chased, cornered, wounded; whom he sees scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. He alone looks death in the face.

What does he believe in? Sometimes everything. Sometimes nothing. It fluctuates like light flitting over a pond.

The system walks through romantically-lit corners, tunnels, bridges, alleyways, metro stations and other elements of the city. He happens to gaze at the back of the human walking ahead of him. It’s an ordinary back of an ordinary boy. Perhaps they are the same person. Perhaps they have no limits; perhaps they flow into each other, stream through each other, boundlessly and magnificently.

The system suddenly feels something like tenderness. His eyes remain to the man’s back, the window through which he sees these feelings. While this happens, the system is thinking, wondering, reaching for dreams inside his head as life flies like a bullet all around his bubble of immersion. The human boy suddenly stops and turns. His eyes are green; his hand are warm. 

The system vibrates with love.

 

* * *

 

 

A human hand can be both: cruel and kind. Two men, one dressed in what could be blood & one dressed in what could be blood. Guns don’t exist. They are only hands: one cold and stiff, and one warm and soft.

“You feel warm,” the system says to the human, only it comes out, “Tell me your name.”

“I bloom for you,” the human says back, only it comes out, “Park Chanyeol."

_(The system doesn’t know what it is about the human boy that closes and opens; only something inside of him understands the voice of his green eyes is deeper than all seas. Nobody, not even the rain has such tender hands.)_

 

* * *

 

 

 

The system’s body is small next to the humans curled in the curve of his side, like a child, clinging to warmth. He glows pink. He’s been blossoming alone over blood vessels, moist lips and living veins beneath skin. When he closes his eyes he dreams of a name but when he wakes he doesn’t move. A name has no value, no strength, no weight against the most precious treasure: Park Chanyeol.

KM can feel the human’s heart– it beats to the irregular pattern of the tides. (He’s beautiful). What the system wants is to stay here, embraced by two human arms. He lets the world drift, and the time crumble– the human the whole universe for him, with the soft void of his breath, and warmth of his smooth skin.

Chanyeol’s fingertips trace the line of the system’s cheeks. Slow, gentle, a strange sensation and it fills something in him like swallowing honey. The system goes still, heartbeat steady. It’s like a summer shower with every drop of rain singing I love you, I love you, I love you.

 

* * *

 

 

The system feels like a parasite, draining the lives of others. How can he lay here, with bloodstained hands and soil Chanyeol’s sheet? He’s a creature consumed with need. This might be the closest to love he ever be.

Someone’s attention shouldn’t have physical weight, but it does. Hate’s a heavy burden; hope is worse. It’s a mix of the two that beats against his skin.

Chanyeol buries his face in the system’s hair and clutches his cheek. His fingers claw deep into synthetic skin. “Yours”, he mumbles and butches the skin with his lips and teeth, scratches over it to leave dark red marks and stains in shapes of rose petals.

“Mine”, the system breathes, shudders when he feels lips clawing and rasping at his neck and his shoulders.The name in his head becomes stained with Chanyeol’s love.

  
The human occupies everything, he occupies everything.

 

* * *

 

When KM touches the human, he shakes like thunderstorms, lips quivering, hands bracing from lust. His mouth is wet and warm and tastes deep, red, sweet and tart together. Something like a heart should taste. The system bites with hunger between his teeth and lust written in his hips.

He forgets the difference between human and machine, anything and anyone. “I gave you my,” he says to the human. “And you gave me your.” He doesn’t know if these words are the name for what happened.

Chanyeol leans forward until his chin rests on top of the systems edged shoulder. “You are such a different country,” he says, warm breath gracing KM cheeks. “Though it is mine too, I will give you _my_.”

He turns around, swift motions and hard grips, and suddenly KM lies under him. His spine hits the mattress hard. Chanyeol pushes his legs apart and blushes. The system watches his lover’s pulse beat beneath the thin layer of pale skin.

“I could eat your name for days,” he says.

There’s too much between them, raw emotions and a path drenched in blood. Lifting his legs to his chest, KM offers himself. Then: a soft brush of lips against lips, the scent of peach in the air, the taste of a thousand dying stars on the system’s tongue. Chanyeol’s cock presses to his entrance and he moans loudly as his lover sinks lower and lower, sliding effortlessly into the machine.

RM starts rocking back against the warm body, meeting each thrust, clenching his muscles, making sure they remain connected. The bed is shaking with each thrust, his head rocking from side to side on the pillow, whimpering as Chanyeol continues pounding into him. Reality shifts into a new rhythm.

_Chanyeol, Chanyeol, Chanyeol._

The human’s body thrusting body is tense, nearly rigid as his breath shakes in the system’s ear. He pushes himself deep inside, closer and closer to the system’s core, as if he wants to merge with the system, become one.

When KM comes, he has forgotten the human’s name. No, he has eaten it.

 

* * *

 

Chanyeol asks KM out for drinks and they go to a bar. The system sits with his hands on the human's lap as Chanyeol gets drunk. He watches every light in the city skyline with the same attention as the glint in his lover's green eyes. Later a cab brings them to the system’s apartment. They make out in the dim rooms, empty as the day he moved in.

"How does dying feel like?" his lover asks.

The system's segments tighten nervously.

"There is a parallel world under this one," he says. "There, everyone of us is real. I can feel the day of my death running underneath this one like an old videotape. My life has no main switch. Death of the system is a luminous, shivering, unrepentant, barking web of kidnaps in the dark."

Chanyeol laughs. “You're so unpredictable. It’s so fun to see what you’ll say or do next.”

The system thinks: he laughed. That’s a good thing.

 

* * *

 

 

He lies on Chanyeol’s mattress. The absence of violence is almost scarier than its presence. The human’s hand– warm, always– glides across his body.

**[What if I don’t want the monster to stop being a monster?]**

The human embraces him and runs his fingers through the system’s hair. “I understand now,” he mumbles.

KM looks at the sky which stretches endless and burning, and feels the weight of all the air pinning him down.

**[What if it’s the only anchor I have left?]**

“Tell me.”

“This city begins and ends in blood. When I came here, I saw a sign at a shop saying _‘you are a child of the universe. this city is mine just as much as it’s anyone's’._ I don’t care about laws anymore. I don’t care about anything anymore except for me, and you. There’s no virtue in this country, it’s all sugar and war.”

The system smiles. He looks like a blossoming almond tree in blue flames.

“You know that my heart is filled with love for you,” Chanyeol says and puts his warm hands on the system’s cheeks. He looks through his synthetic eyes into everything the machine has ever been and everything he wished to be: “Always, I will you love you. Gently, with the whole length of my life.”

 

* * *

 

KM wakes with a name on his tongue. He slides his hand beneath the covers until he comes up against the shoreline of Chanyeol’s body. His shoulder, his chest, the ribs rising and falling underneath his soft skin, his warm belly. The human turns over and puts his arm over him, and KM feels his way along the length of it until he founds the warm wrist, his hand, his pinkie finger. Which he holds.

“I don’t want to be like this,” he says.

“So don’t be.”

The system bites his tongue. He feels disaster because he has a body. If he had no body, what disaster could there be? 

“It’s not that easy." 

“It really, really is.”

The morning is beautiful, the rain outside fresh and the air so full of life. The system buries his head in Chanyeol’s hair. It smells sweet. Like the train itself. The system wonders what would happen if he could unzip his skin, step out of his body. Would he be able to see who he really is? 

**[If you own a body you're alive. ]**

“Just be yourself,” his lover says. 

“My self is just an ever shifting collection of desires and reflections.”

There’s void in the system’s chest. He’s hungry and it hurts but starving works when it costs too much to love.

“How do you know? What is the ‘you’ you might or might not look like? Where do you find it? Where is your authentic body? I’ve been a lot of different people since I was born.”

“A lot of different people,” the system says.

“Dozens.”

“Oh, really?” A wavering shadow passes over him, all the different people he himself has wanted to become, all the sadness and anxiety that he has been trying not to think about now shifting above him like an iceberg.

“So—” the system says. “So—who are you right now?”

“I’m not sure exactly,” the human says and he looks at him for a long time, those green eyes moving in minnow darts, scoping his face. “But I think that’s okay.“

KM lets Chanyeol run his palm over the back of his hand. Across his synthetic knuckles, his fingers, his nails, his fingertips. For whatever reason, it feels like the human is probably the only person who truly knows him. The real him.

„Forget the names,” his lover says. “What if I told you that you could leave your old self behind? Right now. Let me give you a name. All your life you’ve been taking them from this world but they were never yours.”

He takes the system’s palms in his and holds them firmly and draws his face close to his own, so that KM can see how bright and avid and earnest his eyes are.

“You can have one just for yourself.“

The system blinks. He is next to nothing: a nameless physical form that could be exchanged and exchanged and exchanged until nothing remained but molecules. Humans choose their lives that’s what he knows now. And what life will he choose for himself?

“Please.”

Chanyeol smiles and isn’t really crying though his eyes are leaking a little.

 

“Kim Minseok.”

**Author's Note:**

> thank you for reading! feedback is always appreciated.


End file.
